Culture

When a presidential election costs you the person you love the most

Most friendships come and go, but Jacy Topps-Chotas held onto her best friend for 20 years. That is, until the Presidential election got underway.

It wasn't always easy to remain friends. Jacy, who identifies as a lesbian, began to feel estranged from that friend after she voted Republican for three straight elections. To Jacy, that was, "the political party that opposes my civil rights."

Still, the friends had so many memories in common: they had spent family vacations and Christmas holidays together, and Jacy even became a bridesmaid at her friend's wedding. As much as she disagreed with her, Jacy still firmly believed that people, "can have different political affiliations and still remain friends." This was her best friend, the repository for all her favorite gossip, a person she loved.

So Jacy ignored her friend's political beliefs until this election, when all of a sudden she just couldn't anymore.

The 2016 election is different

Jacy, like many other voters this election, struggled to navigate a close relationship with someone from an opposing political party. Historically, American students were taught the same lesson: that politics, while important, shouldn't be be enough to divide us; that it's important to listen to and respect the other side, even when they disagree with you.

But presidential elections are notoriously divisive, and 2016 isn't a normal election. More than any other election in the last three decades of presidential history, this election has brought issues of identity, race, class and gender to the forefront, at the expense of policy-based coverage. Since the start of 2016, three major news programs — ABC's World News Tonight,CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News — have dedicated just 32 minutes combined to actual policy news, the Tyndall Teport recently found.

The election has degenerated into a longwinded comments section on a subreddit, where feverish conversations about whether someone is "attractive enough to be sexually assaulted" upvoted to the presidential debate stage.

American voters, a study recently published in the American Journal of Political Science recently concluded, aren't dispassionately discussing the nuances of charter schools and tax policy: they're angry about their country, and they're only getting angrier.

Voters exclude those who make them feel excluded

Jacy wasn't alone when she decided that the best way to handle her divisive friendship was to end it. A Monmouth University poll conducted in September found that seven percent of people polled lost a friendship because of this election. In April, the typically conservative The Federalist published "If I lose friends over Trump, so be it," and just few months later, the typically progressive Mic published an article confidently titled, "I want a divided America."

While the roots for their anxiety may be different, both Clinton voters and Trump supporters seem to feel excluded from the other party's vision of America. Clinton supporters, who are increasingly Muslim and Latino, are deeply concerned that they may not have a place in Trump's nationalistic "real America," while Trump's "real Americans" feel like they don't belong in Hillary Clinton's "politically correct" America, either. To fight their feelings of exclusion, some choose to strengthen their group identity by then excluding those who disagree with them, on Facebook or in their real lives.

Though there have been many more "MSM" think pieces from Clinton supporters struggling to handle the Trump supporter in their lives, the feeling is mutual. On whisper.sh, an anonymous social media app where people can disclose their most private thoughts, some Trump voters worried that by revealing their inclinations, they would lose the people they cared about the most.

A few proceed to fight exclusion with exclusion

"I lied to my girlfriend. I told her I was voting for Sanders but I voted for Trump instead. If she finds out, she'll leave me," one user confided.

On r/The_Donald, user kittydoses admitted he had ended friendships with Clinton voters, and would actually prefer to be alone than try and engage with them:

"My friends talk about women rights and empowerment, Hillary supports so much oppression in the middle east it's unreal . . . I have realized that me and my friends do not have the same value for life, and realized I should just enjoy my time alone or with people that value integrity and life."

Image: david dermer/ap

Many Clinton voters struggle with the same very impulse, though from a different emotional vantage point. For them, Trump's campaign is grounded in xenophobia, sexism, and fear — and it's impossible to imagine how to include people whose politics are so exclusionary in their personal lives.

"Meredith P." knows this struggle intimately. She'll be voting for Clinton this election, but she grew up in Ohio to two Republican parents who have moved further to the right in recent years.

"They've always been proud Americans, but in the last several years their culture seems to have shifted. It's aggressive," Meredith said. "Flags and crosses on display . . . I'm the kid who moved to New York City and immediately got labeled a 'pretentious liberal.' My family doesn't seem to have much experience conversing with people who don't share their views, so it's been difficult for us. Shouting matches."

Though she said loves her parents, she often struggles to navigate her familial relationships, and wonders how her family will remain intact.

"In the last several years their culture seems to have shifted. It's aggressive."

"My parents would describe themselves as passionately patriotic, but they self-identify with their far-right politics so much that they consider my left-leaning international worldview a rejection of who they are . . .We have been estranged at times, which has made me wonder if my family prefers letting their ideas go unchallenged over having me in their lives," Meredith said.

She's trying to be hopeful.

Politics isn't about policy, but values and emotion

It's agonizing for Meredith, Jacy and Trump supporters alike to sever the personal from the political, especially when it involves the people you love. Political parties give voters a strong sense of identity, social connection and morality.

As Eyal Winter, Professor of Economics at University of Leicester explains, voting behavior is, "not driven by reasoning, but driven by emotions." That kind of thinking goes back to our hunter-gatherer days, when, "we needed to be part of a group in order to survive."

"We use our political views as a tool to tell other people who we are. Through this transmission we generate our social connection," Winter said.

It's not unreasonable, Winter explains, to think of people who belong to a different political party as, in some ways, fundamentally different from ourselves. Research has shown that people who value authority, traditionally on the right, have been influenced by different genetic factors than those who value freedom, who more likely to be found on the left.

So when a Trump voter looks at a Clinton supporter and sees them as not just having distinct politics, but separate values, they're not entirely wrong. Of course there's common ground. But a recent study conducted by the University of Alabama found that liberals were more likely to value empirical science than conservatives. Progressives are more likely to appreciate group diversity and conservatives, group membership. These values aren't new to the 2016 election, nor is the research around them, but they are seemingly more visible and impactful than ever before.

This election season brought the differences keeping Meredith isolated from her family, and Jacy alienated from her best friend, into high relief.

Trying to rebuild

No wonder that Facebook tracks our political views and only promotes posts that they think we would like, and ads that are congruent with our values. Of course voters want to segregate themselves geographically, "Bernie Bros" on one block, Shrilliaries in one suburb, "Trump Thugs" deep in the country, absolutely no one talking to each other on Facebook. Who doesn't want to share a home and a community with people who share the same goals, the same values, and (seemingly) the same heart?

But while a healthy debate is good for discussion, it can be painful to live in a polarized democracy. Jacy didn't want to say goodbye to her best friend. Meredith wants to hold onto her family. They're not righteously celebrating the divide. They're grieving.

Psychologists and sociologists have tried to pave the way forward. It's important, some have suggested, to try and keep an open mind on Facebook. As pleasurable and sometimes necessary as it might be for a Clinton supporter to expunge her Trump-loving cousin from her Facebook feed, social media breakups don't necessarily change hearts and mind. Often, they only serve to confirm the speaker's own worldview.

"The way we know we’re right is when most people around us agree," UCI Professor of Psychology Peter Ditto told Mashable. "Our moral beliefs shape our factual beliefs."

Not, Ditto stressed, the other way around.

There are ways people can preserve their most intimate relationships in an election season, others have argued — assuming that other, more interpersonal issues, aren't actually the source of the problem.

"We're often yelling at each other over things that we have zero influence on," Winter said. "What's going on in our daily life may actually be the source of the problem. The way to deal with it is not try to bridge the political differences."

For some, however, those political differences may be too severe to ignore, especially when you feel like the other party, in Jacy's case, doesn't believe your love has a right to exist. Jacy ended her friendship with an email because she felt that they emotional damage had already been done:

"I didn’t try to convince her," Jacy said. "But the email was heartfelt, as I explained why we couldn’t remain friends. I also wished her and her family the best. I deleted her from all of my social media."

Jacy does think it's theoretically possible, though highly unlikely, that if the political climate changes and sheds some of its hate, that if the parties gain more empathy and work towards inclusiveness, she can rebuild one of the relationships she valued the most.

"I do believe two people can be from opposing political parties and remain friends but not when one of those political parties openly supports sexual assault, vulgarity, racial oppression and LGBTQ discrimination," Jacy said. "When that changes, maybe we can try to rebuild again."

Jacy doesn't believe she'll ever get her best friend back — but she hasn't given up hope, either.

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